Ed Clark: Paint is the Subject @ Hauser & Wirth Zurich - Exhibition Curated by Tanya Barson

Ed Clark: Paint is the Subject

Hauser & Wirth Zurich

13 June – 13 September 2025

Ed Clark in his studio, early 2000s

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Ed Clark in Paris, 1954

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Ed Clark

Untitled, ca. 1968

Acrylic on shaped canvas

294 x 408.3 x 4.1 cm / 115 3/4 x 160 3/4 x 1 5/8 in

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Ed Clark

Untitled, 2002

Acrylic on canvas

170.2 x 239.1 cm / 67 x 94 1/8 in

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse presents ‘Ed Clark. Paint is the Subject,’ the first solo exhibition in Switzerland dedicated to this pioneering American abstractionist. Curated by Tanya Barson in close collaboration with the artist’s estate, the exhibition brings together key works spanning seven decades, offering a comprehensive overview of Clark’s groundbreaking practice. The exhibition features a broad selection of his dynamic large-scale paintings and works on paper, as well as early works and an example of his use of the shaped canvas. The presentation is complemented by archival photographs and documents that provide biographical and historical context, tracing the evolution of his innovative approach and lasting impact on modern painting

Ed Clark remained under-acknowledged for much of his career, but he received late recognition in his lifetime, a recognition that continues to grow. A member of the New York School, Ed Clark contributed towards redefining abstraction in the 1950s with two characteristic features—the deployment of the shaped canvas, and his unconventional use of a household broom to create sweeping, gestural compositions—the show’s title coming from a quote by the artist indicating the centrality of his medium to his work. Stylistically, his work bridges the physicality and spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism with the structured clarity of hard-edged abstraction, cementing his significance in postwar painting.

Born in New Orleans in 1926 and educated in Chicago and Paris, he travelled widely throughout his career, each location, its light and palette, impacting his work. Ed Clark maintained close ties to Europe, living between New York and Paris from the 1960s onward. His aesthetic was shaped by the influence of European artists such as Nicolas de Staël and Pierre Soulages, while his artistic and intellectual circles included Joan Mitchell, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Beauford Delaney, Jack Whitten and James Baldwin, among others.

Ed Clark’s early work was figurative, exemplified in the Zurich exhibition by ‘Standing Woman at the Chair’ (1949–50), before shifting toward abstraction in the early 1950s. During his time in Paris, he explored abstract form. His painting ‘Untitled’ (1954) encapsulates this early period. Immersed in the French contemporary art scene, Ed Clark came to believe that the true essence of painting lies not in realistic representation, but in the expressive application of paint, explored for its own sake: ‘I began to believe […] that the real truth is in the stroke. For me, it is large, bold strokes that do not refer distinctly to seen nature. The paint is the subject. The motions of the strokes give the work life. This began to enter into my paintings in a very personal way.’

Back in New York, Ed Clark continued to innovate. In 1956, he began exploring shaped canvases and supports, which can be considered one of the earliest investigations within American abstract modernism, predating the shaped works of Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Al Loving and Sam Gilliam. He later experimented with oval canvases, first conceived during a stay at Joan Mitchell’s house in Vétheuil, France, in 1968. Works on view in Zurich such as ‘Untitled’ (1970) and ‘Silver Stripes’ (1972) reflect this development, the ellipse motif and the oval support in his work aimed at expanding the field of vision, enhancing the immersive qualities of the canvas.

Ed Clark

Untitled (Acrylic #1 from the series Louisiana), 1978

Acrylic on canvas

168.9 x 233.7 x 1.9 cm / 66 1/2 x 92 x 3/4 in

Photo: Matt Grubb

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Clark’s use of the broom began in Paris and evolved significantly in New York. By the mid-1960s, he was laying his canvases on the floor and using large brooms to deliver sweeping horizontal strokes that captured speed and motion. His gestural language and ever greater emphasis on the brushstroke became central to his practice. A key highlight of the show is ‘Untitled (Acrylic #1 from the series Louisiana)’ (1978), where Ed Clark uses acrylics to capture the palette of the landscape of the Southern United States. Dividing the canvas into three sections—evoking earth, air, and water—he applied paint with broom, brush, and by hand, translating these environmental elements into abstract form. His choice of colors, ranging through pinks, blues, and beiges, deepens the specific sense of atmosphere evoking the landscape of his early childhood, and his return there to teach at Louisiana State University in the late 1970s.

Ed Clark

Untitled, ca. 1990s

Acrylic on canvas

139.1 x 179.1 cm / 54 3/4 x 70 1/2 in

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

© The Estate of Ed Clark

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

As the 1980s progressed, Ed Clark began exploring a new compositional approach he termed his tubular paintings, first seen in the series of ‘Broken Rainbow’ works. These supplanted the structures of narrow horizontal lines he employed in the previous decade, with curved strokes that introduced a suggestion of rotation as in ‘Untitled’ (ca. 1990s). In later works such as ‘Untitled’ (2002), Ed Clark continues this exploration through broad, sweeping gestures and a looser, more fluid structure that became characteristic of his later style.

The Zurich exhibition provides a rare opportunity to experience the full scope of Clark’s practice, placing him in relation to diverse histories of abstraction and highlighting the enduring relevance of his work. It emphasizes how for Ed Clark abstract art represented a greater truth than any realist depiction of the world and that for him ‘paint is the subject.’

Several works by Ed Clark are also currently on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as part of the exhibition ‘Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950 – 2000’ at the Centre Pompidou (19 March – 30 June 2025), which explores the presence of black artists in France. His inclusion highlights the important African American diaspora working in Paris and the long-standing influence of Europe on his practice, situating his work within broader transatlantic narratives.

HAUSER & WIRTH ZURICH

Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zurich

www.hauserwirth.com

Featured Related Posts:

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 

Grey Art Museum, New York University, March 2 - July 20, 2024

Ed Clark 

Turner Contemporary, Margate, 25 May - 1 September 2024

Beyond the Spectrum: Abstraction in African American Art, 1950-1975

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, January 11 – March 8, 2014

Black Paris Exhibition @ Centre Pompidou, Paris - Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance 1950 – 2000 (In English)

Black Paris

Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance

1950 – 2000

Centre Pompidou, Paris

March 19 – June 30, 2025

Vers la version en français de l'exposition Paris Noir

Ed Clark

Untitled, (Vétheuil), 1967

Acylic on canvas, 177,8 × 208,3 cm

© The Estate of Ed Clark. 

Courtesy of the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Photo © Sarah Muehlbauer

Premier Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs 

(First Congress of Black Writers and Artists)

Paris, September 1956

© Présence Africaine Éditions, 1956

Photographie © Lutetia

From the creation of the Présence Africaine review to that of Revue noire, Black Paris retraces the presence and influence of Black artists in France from the 1950s to 2000. The exhibition celebrates 150 artists of African descent, from Africa to the Americas, whose works have often never been displayed in France before.

Black Paris offers a vibrant immersion in a cosmopolitan Paris, a place of resistance and creation that gave rise to a wide variety of practices, from a new awareness of identity to the search for trans-cultural artistic languages. From international to Afro-Atlantic abstractions via surrealism and free figuration, this historical voyage reveals the importance of artists of African descent in the redefinition of Modernisms and Post-modernisms.

Four installations produced especially for the exhibition by Valérie John, Nathalie Leroy-Fiévée, Jay Ramier and Shuck One punctuate the visit and provide contemporary insights into this memory. At the centre, a circular matrix takes up the motif of the Black Atlantic, the ocean as a disk, a metonymy of the Caribbean and the “Whole-World”, to use the term coined by Martinican poet Edouard Glissant, as a metaphor for the Parisian space. Attentive to circulations, networks and friendships, the exhibition proposes a living and often entirely new map of Paris.

Black Paris: A transnational artistic map

From the 1950s, Afro-American and Caribbean artists explored new forms of abstraction in Paris (Ed Clark, Beauford Delaney, Guido Llinás), while artists from the continent outlined the first Pan-African modernisms (Paul Ahyi, Skunder Boghossian, Christian Lattier, Demas Nwoko). New artistic movements emerged in Paris, such as that of the Fwomajé group (Martinique) and Vohou-Vohou (Côte d’Ivoire) The exhibition also presents the first post-colonial movements of the 1990s, marked by the affirmation of the notion of ethnic mixing in France. 

Black Paris: A tribute to artists of African descent in Paris

After the Second World War, Paris became an intellectual centre where figures such as James Baldwin, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor converged to lay down the foundations of a post- and de-colonial future. The exhibition captures the political and cultural effervescence of the period, in the midst of struggles for independence and the fight for civil rights in the United States, by offering a unique immersion in the artistic expressions of Négritude, Pan-Africanism and the transatlantic movements.

Black Paris: An exhibition between utopia and emancipation

The exhibition retraces half a century of struggles for emancipation, from African independence to the fall of the apartheid, and the fight against racism in France. “Black Paris” highlights the aesthetic power and political strength of those artists who, through their creations, challenged the prevailing narratives and reinvented a universalism “of differences” in a post-colonial world. This political background provided the context, and sometimes direct frame of reference, for certain artistic practices. In parallel or in contrast, the exhibition also includes plastic experimentations that are often solitary but find aesthetic ties within the display.

Recognised as a key space of classical artistic training and, at the same time, a centre of experimentation, Paris held exceptional appeal for creators, whether visitors or residents. The city was a nexus of encounters and point of transit – particularly towards Africa – that lent itself to the affirmation of transnational trajectories.

Black Paris: An ambitious cultural programme

The exhibition is accompanied by a rich cultural programme in Paris and abroad. Conferences, publications, the acquisition of works by the Musée National d’Art Moderne and archives at the Kandinsky Library, thanks to the “Black Paris” fund, contribute to enhancing the visibility of Black artists. These initiatives also allow the creation of a lasting archive of militant and artistic anticolonial culture in a national institution.

Curators: Alicia Knock, curator, head of contemporary creation and prospective department, Musée national d’art moderne − Centre Pompidou.

Associate curators: Eva Barois De Caevel, curator, Aurélien Bernard, Laure Chauvelot, and Marie Siguier, conservation officers, contemporary creation and prospective department, Musée national d’art moderne − Centre Pompidou.

For a list of Exhibited Artists, see the French version of this Post "Paris Noir" with more artworks

Related Post (in English): Sarah Maldoror Films at Centre Pompidou's Cinemas (Associated programme to the "Black Paris" exhibition)

CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS

centrepompidou.fr

Ed Clark @ Turner Contemporary, Margate

Ed Clark

Turner Contemporary, Margate

25 May - 1 September 2024

Turner Contemporary presents the first institutional exhibition in Europe dedicated to pioneering artist ED CLARK (1926-2019). The exhibition unites paintings and works on paper from the 1940s to 2000s, including loans from The Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum and Detroit Institute of Arts, many of which have not been seen outside the USA.

Though late to receive international acclaim, Clark’s contributions to contemporary art were significant, notably through his innovative push broom technique and shaped canvases. Today, Ed Clark is recognised as a groundbreaking figure within the New York School of Abstraction.

Born in New Orleans and raised in Chicago, Ed Clark used credits from his G.I. Bill to attend the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago from 1947 to 1951. In 1952, he furthered his studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he would return to make work for the rest of his life. Clark’s experiences in the bohemian quarter of Montparnasse and, later, New York’s downtown scene deeply influenced his shift towards abstraction and working on a large scale. In 1956, he adopted the use of a 48-inch push broom to allow him to drive paint across the canvas with great force, a technique known as 'the big sweep' and exemplified in works such as Locomotion 1963. On his return to the US that year, Ed Clark settled in New York, where he co-founded the influential Brata Gallery and created Untitled 1957, a seminal piece in the evolution of shaped painting and a highlight of the exhibition’s section devoted to Clark’s early canvases.

Travel and how a sense of place profoundly influenced Clark’s work are at the heart of the exhibition. In 1971, visiting artist Jack Whitten in Crete proved transformative. As the Mediterranean light inspired a new colour palette, so it motivated him to seek out different lights and atmospheres, including in Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, China and Japan, as well as across the US. This theme is explored in depth throughout the exhibition with works on paper and paintings including Untitled 1970 – an example of his oval-shaped canvases first made in Vétheuil, France – Untitled from Louisiana Series 1978-80 and the dazzling Ife Rose 1974.

Set against the expansive North Sea, Turner Contemporary is uniquely placed to explore how, as one contemporary critic observed, Clark’s canvases registered his “sensitivity to the pigmentation of the earth and the colour of the skies.”

The exhibition concludes with key examples of paintings from the mid-1980s to 2000s, a period when Ed Clark brought new structures to his compositions with sweeping rainbows, tubes, and waves of colour. Seen together, these works will underscore Clark’s enduring fascination with his material. In his own words, “The paint is the subject."

We are delighted to host Ed Clark's first European exhibition at Turner Contemporary. His pioneering work from the 1950s, marked using unconventional tools like the push broom, has redefined American abstraction. The natural light of our galleries will uniquely accentuate Clark's vibrant exploration of colour and form. Just as the varied landscapes from Chicago to Paris and Brazil to Greece shaped his vision, we anticipate his work will resonate profoundly within the luminous spaces of our gallery, complemented by the ever-changing sea and sky beyond. -- Clarrie Wallis, Director of Turner Contemporary

TURNER CONTEMPORARY

Rendezvous, Margate, CT9 1HG

www.turnercontemporary.org

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 @ Grey Art Museum, New York University + Other venues

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 

Grey Art Museum, New York University

March 2 - July 20, 2024

Ralph Coburn 

Aux Bermudes, 1951–52 

Oil on six painted panels, painted wood, 28 3/4 x 55 1/4 in. 

Private collection, New York. Courtesy David Hall Gallery, LLC

James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney, Paris, c. 1960  

© Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of 

Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator 

Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

Ed Clark 

The City, 1952 

Acrylic on canvas, 51 x 78 1/2 in. 

Collection of Melanca Clark, Detroit 

Courtesy Hauser and Wirth 

© Estate of Ed Clark. 

Photo: Hollister and Young, Michigan Imaging 

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, the first major exhibition to examine the historical impact of the expatriate art scene in Paris after World War II, opens on March 2024 at the Grey Art Museum at New York University, formerly the Grey Art Gallery. This international loan exhibition is the museum’s inaugural presentation in its new home at 18 Cooper Square in the NoHo Historic District in downtown Manhattan.

Showcased in the new galleries are more than 130 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, textiles, and works on paper. Loans from a wide range of collections—public and private, from the U.S. and abroad—provide a fresh perspective on a moment of creative ferment too often overshadowed by the contemporaneous ascendancy of the New York City art scene. The exhibition also sheds new light on the contributions of artists who relocated to France hoping to escape institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Six years in the making, Americans in Paris is organized by the Grey Art Museum, New York University, and curated by the independent scholar Debra Bricker Balken with Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey. Lynn Gumpert says, “When Debra and I began to discuss the idea for this exhibition, we were astonished to find that there had been no other major show or publication on this mid-century phenomenon, despite the fact that a number of the artists are very well known.”

Says Debra Bricker Balken, “This has been an intellectual adventure far richer than we could have anticipated. Along the way, we have encountered artists whose achievements deserve more scholarly attention. We’ve also gained new insight into the cultural, social, and aesthetic complexities these artists were grappling with as they forged new modernist territory in the postwar era.”

Seventy artists are represented in Americans in Paris, including many whose work has not received the recognition it merits—James Bishop, Robert Breer, Ralph Coburn, Harold Cousins, Claire Falkenstein, Shirley Jaffe, Kimber Smith, and Shinkichi Tajiri among them. Others are well-known, even canonical, figures, such as Sam Francis, Leon Golub, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Mitchell, Kenneth Noland, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, Mark Tobey, and Jack Youngerman.

Intense experimentation among these closely knit, if shifting, circles of artists generated a variety of formal inventions and personal artistic styles. Visitors to Americans in Paris encounter such works as The City (1952), by Ed Clark, a vibrant large-scale painting where primary and secondary colors collide like bumper cars; an abstract painting by Shirley Jaffe that wrests an individual imprint from the period’s default style; and masterly works by Joan Mitchell, all explosions and tangles of paint skeins in her inimitable palette.

That abstraction also took an entirely different turn from gestural, painterly compositions is seen in Ralph Coburn’s semaphore-like Aux Bermudes (1951–52); Ellsworth Kelly’s Fond Jaune (1950), where fragmented forms balance delicately on a yellow ground; and Carmen Herrera’s elegant Curves: Orange, Blue and White, 1949. Figuration was present, too, as is seen in Barbershop (1950), by Haywood “Bill” Rivers, wherein the Black North Carolina-reared artist renders a scene from the American South in an impastoed faux-naif style. In Shinkichi Tajiri’s Lament for Lady (for Billie Holiday) (1953), the sculptor creates a disjunctive assemblage of industrial cast-offs that combines symbolic elements, like a bent-and-crumpled brass gardenia, with an actual photograph of the jazz icon.

Because a good number of the works on view come from early in the artists’ careers, Americans in Paris contributes to the understanding of the development of many of the featured artists—dramatically so in the case of the abstract paintings by William Klein, works that preceded his experiments in photography and his later success as an art and commercial photographer and a filmmaker.

While the first section of Americans in Paris focuses on 25 American artists who lived and worked in France for a year or more, the second section—the “Salon”—provides visitors with a snapshot of art that the expats themselves would have encountered in the influential salons and galleries of postwar Paris, such as works by Jean Dubuffet, Georges Matthieu, and Wols. Also featured in this section are contributions by artists who likewise spent a year or more in the City of Light, including Louise Bourgeois, Bernard Childs, William Copley, and Liliane Lijn. Black American artists Emil Cadoo, Herbert Gentry, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Larry Potter, and filmmaker Melvin van Peebles; Filipino American Alfonso Ossorio; Chinese American Walasse Ting; and Native American George Morrison, are likewise represented.

“When Being an American in Paris Seemed the Thing to Be”

Jack Youngerman, one of the first GIs to land in Paris, was quoted as saying that being an American in Paris after the war seemed the thing to be. He could have been speaking for any number of the artists represented in Americans in Paris.

The exhibition covers a 17-year period beginning in 1946, when the U.S. Embassy in Paris began processing applications from ex-service members for the new GI Bill. A monthly stipend of $75 allowed expats to live fairly comfortably in postwar Paris, which was still recovering from the Nazi occupation. Enrollment in the city’s numerous ateliers was not only easy, but was paid for by the GI Bill. Modern masters such as Ferdinand Léger and Ossip Zadkine, as well as schools such as the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Académie Julian, welcomed Americans, whose tuition provided a steady income stream. Study in Paris offered the opportunity to visit the capital’s famed museums and to hang out in its legendary cafés frequented by the likes of Alberto Giacometti, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1950, American artists even established their own cooperative gallery, Galerie Huit, named for its address at 8, rue Saint-Julien-le Pauvre on the Left Bank.

At the same time, the Americans encountered undercurrents of nationalistic tension, as French artists and critics sought to maintain the centuries-long artistic preeminence of the City of Light. By 1962—when the show concludes—many artists felt that the once-inspiring atmosphere in Paris had diminished. That same year, Algeria achieved independence from France after many years of demonstrations and riots, and ultimately, war. By then, many Americans had decided to return to the U.S., which was experiencing a burgeoning Civil Rights movement of its own, along with––due to the rise of artist-run galleries in New York––more opportunities to exhibit.

Tour: After its debut at the Grey, Americans in Paris travels to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery in the United Arab Emirates.

Americans in Paris: 

Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962

Co-published by Hirmer and the Grey Art Museum, New York University

Publication: Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 is accompanied by a 300-page volume of the same name, which was released in fall 2022. Co-published by Hirmer and the Grey Art Museum, New York University, it has been shortlisted for the 2023 American Library in Paris Book Award. In addition to an introduction by Lynn Gumpert, essays by Debra Balken, Rashida K. Braggs, Elisa Capdevila, and J. English Cook investigate the distinctive nature of the postwar scene, the Black experience in Paris, the critical reception of American artists by the Parisian art world and its salon system, and the Hollywood films that mythologized the expat experience, respectively. Americans in Paris also includes an extensive, illustrated chronology of the period, along with never-before-published interviews from the early 1990s, where artists, dealers, critics, and curators active in mid-century Paris spoke to Billy Klüver and Julie Martin. $55 retail. Available in the Grey Art Museum Bookstore and online.

About the Curators

Debra Bricker Balken is an award-winning independent curator, scholar, and writer who has assembled numerous exhibitions internationally for major museums on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art. Most recently, she authored Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and Arthur Dove: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Things (Yale University Press, 2021). In 2017, she curated Mark Tobey: Threading the Light, which was organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, and opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with that year’s Venice Biennale.

Lynn Gumpert has been director of the Grey Art Museum, New York University’s fine arts museum, since 1997. Among the more than 75 exhibitions she has overseen at the Grey are Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection (2019); The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018); and Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (2017). She previously worked as a writer, consultant, and independent curator, organizing shows in New York, Japan, and France, and as senior curator at the New Museum, New York. In 1999, she was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

GREY ART MUSEUM, New York University

18 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003

greyartgallery.nyu.edu

Color Field Painting 60 Years: 1958-2018 @ Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York

Color Field Painting 60 Years: 1958-2018

Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York

April 26 - July 1, 2022

Barbara Mathes Gallery presents Color Field Painting 60 Years: 1958-2018. Featuring works by Ed Clark, Thomas Downing, Sam Francis, Sam Gilliam, Charles Hinman and Kenneth Noland, the exhibition explores the history of the Color Field movement and its legacy in the 21st Century. From the 1960s onwards, a generation of American artists began to rethink postwar gestural abstraction. Retaining an interest in color, artists such as Ed Clark, Kenneth Noland, and Thomas Downing began to experiment with framing and shaped canvases, while Sam Gilliam and Charles Hinman abandoned the traditional frame altogether, breaking the boundaries between the space of the painting and the space of the viewer. Driven by technical innovation, the artists presented here expand the definitions of their medium while exploring the effects of light and luminous color.

Experimentation with color and the question of the frame were central concerns of Ed Clark. In the 1960s Clark became the first artist to exhibit a shaped canvas which appeared in a group exhibition at the Brata Gallery in New York. Ed Clark was already known for his rethinking of gestural abstraction: in the 1950s he began to apply paint with a push broom, a technique he termed “the big sweep.” In Untitled (1996) Ed Clark reinterprets the oval forms that had preoccupied him in his early canvases, presenting curved shapes not as virtuosic brushstrokes, but rather as glowing clouds of atmospheric color.

Ceaseless invention is a hallmark of Sam Gilliam’s career. In his canonical Drape series, begun in 1968, he suspended unstretched canvases from the walls and ceiling. Freeing the canvas from its frame allowed Gilliam to push the boundaries between painting and sculpture while establishing the artist as leading innovator in the Color Field movement. In B Series II (2015) Gilliam uses pigment-based ink on handmade paper, manipulating the material to create sharp vertical folds within which the luminous pigment pools and smears. Gilliam cites Jazz as an influence and the tension between improvisation and structure –between the ink’s liquidity and the linear structure of the paper’s folds—is characteristic of his experiments with media.

The picture frame was of equal interest to Kenneth Noland, an artist who defined the “post-painterly abstraction” of a generation that reacted against the gestural qualities of Abstract Expressionism. A key member of the Washington Color School, Kenneth Noland reduced his compositions to geometric shapes such as circles, chevrons, and lines which he painted on unprimed canvases. Through these simple forms he explored geometry and color relationships. In Walk (1964) he plays with the limits of the frame – turning the painting on its side and both echoing and mirroring its corners in spare ninety-degree angles.

BARBARA MATHES GALLERY

22 East 80th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.barbaramathesgallery.com

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